sesa 2012 - The 2nd Workshop on Sensor-Enabled Situational Awareness

Advances in sensing and multimedia data capture technologies coupled with mechanisms for low power wireless networking have enabled the possibility of creating deeply instrumented physical spaces. Embedded sensors and data capture devices in such environments have potential to capture the state of the evolving physical systems and processes creating situational awareness of the activities in the instrumented space. Situational awareness, in a broad sense, refers to a continuum of knowledge that captures the current state of the physical environments being observed, to future projected states of these observed environments. Such situational awareness offers opportunities to realizing new functionalities and / or bringing transformational improvements in many application domains.
While the potential of sensor enabled situational awareness is well recognized, its realization poses numerous challenges which are being actively pursued by the research communities in different disciplines ranging from embedded computing, networking, distributed systems, middleware, data management, software engineering, machine learning, to privacy and security. On the application side, sensor enabled situational awareness forms a critical core for several of the emerging applications including environmental monitoring, Internet of Things and Cyber Physical Systems. The purpose of this workshop is to serve as a multidisciplinary forum to bring researchers from diverse disciplines to discuss the state of the art, identify new emerging challenges and opportunities. With CPS week hosting several conferences related to the domain of cyber physical systems, including IPSN and ICCPS, SESA serves as a fitting venue to discuss the broad challenges in the domain before specific challenges are addressed in each of these conferences. The workshop will comprise contributed and invited papers, a keynote and a panel on topics as outlined below.
List of Topics:
We solicit papers/contributions related (but not limited) to the following themes:
New sensing modalities - e.g., audio/video sensors, mobile phone based sensing, human sensors and social networking as information sources.
Novel applications of sensor enabled situational awareness.
Programming methodologies /abstractions that overcome complexities due to sensor heterogeneity, uncertainty, and errors in sensor data.
Modeling & understanding observed environments.
Context reasoning and aggregation leading to situational awareness.
Scalability and robustness of sensor driven systems that continuously monitor physical spaces.
Privacy challenges due to fine-grained sensor data capture.
Take advantage of diversity of communication methodologies aware.
Energy aware applications optimizing on limited battery capacity even when it comes to today's smartphones.
Experiences in building sensor driven situational awareness.